SAGE 2016
#wow #woah

Utopia plays wonderfully and tbh is the best 3D Sonic has ever controlled, bar the Adventures (though they're too twitchy at high speeds, which this fixes sooo). It needs a button to center the camera, though. And maybe the peel-out needs to be a tad more powerful? It seems just as weak, if not weaker than the Spin Dash. Other than those nitpicks, it's a good pizza pie.

If the level design was more focused and less ultra wide open, I think we'd be in for a true winner on our hands.

The art style is really cool and well efforted too, though personally I don't really see this as the ideal Sonic aesthetic, even if it may be for a lot of people here lmao. Different strokes. The sound effects I can get behind completely though; particularly the rolling and curling sounds. Very OVAish and very very rad.

Sonic Utopia fucking nails it. This is the smoothest, butteriest 3D Sonic. I never failed to make a jump or do exactly what I intended to do. I've long been a proponent of the soft homing attack that retains your momentum and functions more as an aim assist to enable those massive object bounces you could do in the classics, glad to finally see it implemented. Level design is completely absent, but that's irrelevant at this stage- all I'm thinking about is what I'd do with this engine, and I can hardly believe it's even possible right now.

I haven't tried Utopia yet, but I've watched a few videos to see what it was. It looks amazing, but looking at Sonic made me realize something. He looks like an HD version of how he looked in Sonic R.

Nearly all of the open-world Sonic "playgrounds" that we see are themed around Green Hill, and they usually get complaints about lack of direction. Why not theme something around Sonic R, and make a race-track? You can have the same open-world layout, and actually have direction to it. I'd imagine setting up a series of checkpoints at different places, and one "lap" would be hitting all the check-points in order. You'd have a Crazy-Taxi style arrow or something to give you an idea of where each checkpoint is without giving it away too much. Keep ghost data of your last three or four playthroughs, and you don't even have to write up some crazy AI for the other racers. Just reskin each ghost as a different racer, so you'd eventually get to race against Tails, Knuckles, and Amy, just like the original Sonic R.

It's incredible, because the when I saw the first video it already looked fun. That's how you should be able to play with Sonic's speed, through a big map where you're able to do the tricks you want where you want, not running through a straight corridor finishing it with a qick time event.

With a game system like this, when you have a mission like "find Tails", you really will have to find him. It may sound stupid or obvious, but it would make a very interesting system: in the same level, one mission is to find Tails, so you freely go around the map, and later another mission like "escape form the level" so you'll have to find the fastest track.